This week Marci Baun visits the blog. I met Marci online after her company, Wild Child Publishing, came to Hot Mojave Knights Reader Event in Las Vegas three years ago. Marci writes contemporary romance, horror, and romantic suspense. Her most recent release, MR. HOTNESS, is a contemporary romance. Today I asked Marci one question about how she became a publisher.

BBTF: Many authors look forward to being published. What made you take the step into becoming a publisher as well as writer?

Marci: Actually, I started out as a publisher. It was never my intent to be a writer. That’s not to say I didn’t have allusions of grandeur of writing the next American bestselling novel at some point in my life. I’d written a fan fic in grammar school with that in mind (never to see the light of day and long gone), some poetry (which won awards) in high school, and 5 one-woman shows that I performed around California. I’d also started a couple of screenplays that I never finished or did anything with and I have a couple of unfinished musicals for which I composed the music. However, I do believe I had stories in me waiting to emerge, but I didn’t have a reason to write them. Only after I opened Wild Child Magazine in 1999 and we needed some stories to flesh it out for the first couple of issues did the writing bug bite me. That being said, you’ll notice I only have a few, even though I’ve been in the business for several years (17 in September, but who’s counting). This has a lot to do with me being a publisher and finding the time to write and research them. My muse loves to throw ideas at me that require massive amounts of incredibly difficult research. (Take my current WIP set in China in the 1960s.) That being said, I have a few more stories besides the ones listed below—two no longer for sale that were in two of the Dreams & Desires anthologies (all net proceeds to the specified battered woman’s shelter listed with the book), one that’s a freebie under the long abandoned pseudonym Rosa Orrore and only available at Wild Child Publishing, and a couple that are either published on my site or were published in e-zines. The Dreams & Desires anthologies containing my stories can only be purchased as print books through Freya’s Bower anymore. (So, if you want one, you can find them here: http://www.freyasbower.com/index.html?cPath=47) Perhaps one of these days I’ll pull the stories out and get covers for them to sell as standalone stories, although one of them probably would become a freebie if I release it at all. The urge to write has grown more with the years, but I do still consider myself more of a publisher than a writer. I don’t know if that will ever change.